The presentation of my PhD defence

That’s it! Last week I defended my PhD thesis!! I have gone through it, and survived to tell!

I don’t feel very different from before, apart from being relieved :-). Now the future is possibly more difficult than before, because I have to look for a job position and finish a lot of things.

While I was preparing the slideshow, I realized that there are not many examples of presentations for a PhD defence online. This is bad, because you need all forms of help to prepare this presentation.The PhD defence is the last thing that you do as a PhD student, so you want to do it perfectly. It is also the moment when you describe many years of your work to the your colleagues and family. Thus, it is bad that there are few examples of slideshows for PhD defence online.

Here is the presentation that I have prepared for my defence. I hope that it will be useful to other people as an example for their defences.

I think that, for this type of presentation, the first slide to make is the “summary of the talk” slide, like the “Topics” slide I have. Usually I don’t like to have such summary slides in my presentation, but for the Thesis defence it is very important, because it gives you a feeling of security when you present. Having a well defined structure allows you to know when you can stop to drink some water or to check if everybody is following, and to know exactly what to say in each slide of the talk.